GS makes me cry.

I hate the spell so much. "Afflictid casts Guardian Spirit on Nerdslayer" "Nerdslayer dies" Thanks three minute useless cooldown for not saving the tank from a normal melee hit! <3 Blizzarddddddd.

For clarification, it was just a Heroic Rag normal Melee hit after a seed explosion that killed him, I tossed GS when the seeds exploded because I saw him low, but he still died from the preceeding melee swing. If my human reaction time is fast enough to place it on the tank, it should work. Nuff said. It is broken right now.

I've learned that the only time it fails is if the time between the death blow and you casting it is extremely close. Sure, we all wish that bug would be worked out (if it is indeed one), but for the most part GS is lovely. And I say this with that exact scenario occurring to me tonight

This is counted after mitigation and resistances, so it's not a major deal, unless you try to cheese yourself out of a "big bang" damage pass. Blizzard added this limitation in patch 4.0.

- It's a "deadly damage ability". Anything marked with an exclamation mark on the encounter journal counts as such.

Because the previous limit wasn't good enough since tanks could just pop all their cooldowns. We now have both these limitations in play, trying to solve the same issue.

- You cast it less than 0.3 seconds before the damage hits.

This is somewhat imprecise though. There are two time-related issues. The first and simplest one is server lag. If your network is so slow that the GS reaches the server after the damage was resolved, the ability fails. You still loose the cooldown. Sucks to be you. But at least this is simple to understand.

The second problem is slightly more complex. Every 0.3 seconds the server "ticks". Damage and healing is resolved at tick intervals. At least this was true in TBC - I honestly don't know if they have changed it since then, so this information may be outdated. At the end of a tick, buffs are applied. So if you cast the ability 0.1 second before the major damage hit (assuming 0 network transmission time), the GS ability is not applied until after the next tick is resolved. Meaning: you cast GS, damage hits, target dies, GS is applied - but target is dead, so it fizzles.

They did change Ardent Defender in late WoTLK to apply before any damage hits. They also did that for GS for a while, but then they got into the situation where GS procced multiple times if you had several killing blows within one tick. So they reverted it, and kept it in the "old style" for more than a year. At the beginning of Cataclysm, they did something to "improve the reliability of GS", but I don't quite know what that was. And to be honest, I still had a failure rate of 30% throughout T11 content - and I blame most of it to this.

In T12, it seems more reliable - but then again I have used it a lot less.

I used it for saving the tank from killing blows, but when I saw how many times it failed me, I've started to use it as a healing increase cooldown when I know that lots of damage will come on the tank.

Yes, when you need it the most, it fails the most, unfortunatly. I now tried to relearn the usage of it to; aka using it when I know tank will have a rough time, or time it before predictable damage. Not as much fun, no, but what can we do.

This is counted after mitigation and resistances, so it's not a major deal, unless you try to cheese yourself out of a "big bang" damage pass. Blizzard added this limitation in patch 4.0.

- It's a "deadly damage ability". Anything marked with an exclamation mark on the encounter journal counts as such.

Because the previous limit wasn't good enough since tanks could just pop all their cooldowns. We now have both these limitations in play, trying to solve the same issue.

Thank you for this info. I'm assuming you mean anything marked with the deadly red skull icon (rather than the "important" exclamation point in the dungeon journal cannot be helped by GS? Also, do you know if Ardent Defender works in this same fashion or does that have looser restrictions?

I hate the spell so much. "Afflictid casts Guardian Spirit on Nerdslayer" "Nerdslayer dies" Thanks three minute useless cooldown for not saving the tank from a normal melee hit! <3 Blizzarddddddd

*At Front Page sees "GS makes me cry" in recent forum post*

I think to myself, "Oh god people are STILL crying about that addon?" Click on the link and it's about Guardian Spirit. /sigh of relief

I'm just a fan of a brand new wiki: pcgamingwiki.com
A one stop place to help you get your favorite PCGames not only running on your machine, fix issues you might have, find the latest patches from the developers or fans, and more.
It's a brand new site, so help out by contributing.

Healing spells in general behave the same way. If you make a habit out of reading the death meter whenever someone dies, you see heals land after the death line all the time. It's the way the server sorts out incoming damage and healing. If the server has to deal with both, it always calculates the incoming damage first, *THEN* the healing.

You can see the same thing happen with Pain Suppression too.

Tank dies.
Tank gains Pain Suppression.

Nothing new. That it triggers the CD on abilities like PS and GS, while aggravating at times, isn't something to get butt hurt about. Get better at casting it quicker. It lasts 10 seconds!

Thank you for this info. I'm assuming you mean anything marked with the deadly red skull icon (rather than the "important" exclamation point in the dungeon journal cannot be helped by GS? Also, do you know if Ardent Defender works in this same fashion or does that have looser restrictions?

Oops. My bad, The red skull is the deadly damage. Not the exclamation mark. Right you are!

Ardent Defender is at the core the same spell as guardian spirit, but it comes without the HP and deadly damage limitations. I think
Honestly not really sure.

It definitively does not have any HP limit, but it may not be protecting against deadly damage. Nothing is supposed to protect against deadly damage. That's the entire deal with deadly damage. But I would have to ask a guildie paladin to know for sure

Ardent Defender blows.
The proc heal is only 15%, and it's very typical for a sequential blow to finish you off b/c your health pool is far too low @ ~30k
Guardian Spirit's heal effect is perfectly fine. It's capped at around 300k damage from a single hit, I wouldn't call that a limitation at all.